As preparations began for the 1939 New York World’s Fair, there was considerable concern about presenting a cleanly image to visitors. Bernard Sachs and E. H. L. Corwin, both officials of the Committee of Twenty on Street and Outdoor Cleanliness, argued in a letter to the New York Times that the World’s Fair was an opportunity to pursue comprehensive sanitary improvements in New York City. “The 'Wonder City of the World,' beyond a doubt;” they wrote, “the 'cleanest city,' by no means. But we must make it that."[1] Another letter to George McAneny, the Fair Corporation’s Chairman of the Board advised an increased police presence to enforce sanitary standards. "This is important to the interest of the city when the Fair crowds come,” the letter read. “Do we want to exhibit a clean or an unclean city [sic].”[2] Municipal engineer George A. Soper suggested making sanitation a “major element” of the World’s Fair, including exhibits on sanitation and public health.[3] He argued that sanitation would be of interest to the general public, and was crucial since the Fair would be built on “one of the most insanitary parts of the City” – a former ash dump in Flushing Meadows.[4]

Healing Gotham: New York City’s Public Health Policies for the Twenty-First Century​By Bruce F. BergJohns Hopkins University Press, 2015​312 pg.

Reviewed by Erin Wuebker

The goal of Bruce F. Berg’s Healing Gotham is to explain why particular public policy tools have been used by the city’s government to deal with five different public health problems in the late 20th and early 21st century: lead poisoning, asthma, HIV/AIDS, obesity, and West Nile virus. Berg selected these particular issues not to be comprehensive, but rather to show health concerns that have different etiologies and affect different groups in order to analyze how these factors might impact the city’s approach to dealing with each illness.

​Having written previously about New York politics, it makes sense that the city would be his focus for this book as well. But he also makes a compelling argument for his selection. As the largest urban area and an incredibly diverse city, New York has had to deal with a wide variety of public health issues. It has also often been at the forefront of public health historically, leading the nation in terms of developing infrastructure and support for government intervention. As such, New York has often been a model for other cities, demonstrating which “tools” are the most effective or challenging.

​The white stone-and-brick Beaux Arts building at 80 Fifth Avenue stands at the southwest corner of 14th street, its Palladian windows reflecting a passing parade of New School students. Built in 1908, the classical style of the sixteen-story Hudson Building (also known as the Van Schaik) evokes Gilded Age New York. A 1921 advertisement encouraged “only high-class tenants,” to seek office space in the building; “only well-rated, non-manufacturing concerns” need apply.[1] Despite the white-glove ambitions of its owners, by the onset of the Depression the building housed a variety of immigrant and left-wing organizations, including the Communist-affiliated International Workers Order (IWO), a fraternal order offering low-cost health and life insurance. By 1940, the IWO occupied a significant portion of the building, from the tenth through the sixteenth floors. In the summer of 1944, as the IWO was rapidly becoming one of the largest leftwing organizations in the country, the FBI broke into the IWO offices for the first time. Over the next decade, the FBI tapped the IWO’s phones, read employees’ mail, and searched the offices multiple times, monitoring the organization’s “Red” tendencies. By the end of the decade, information provided by the FBI helped New York State shut down the IWO, and 80 Fifth Avenue lost one of its most remarkable features: the IWO’s flagship birth control clinic.

By Richard Howe On December 31, 1761, “the Frequent Instances of the Extensive Destruction made by Fire in many populous City’s [sic]” prompted the legislature of the Province of New York to pass an act “for the more Effectual Prevention of Fires and for Regulating of Buildings in the City of New York.” The act’s principal concern was the number of the houses in the city that were still roofed with wooden shingles...

By Richard Howe The men whom the New York State Legislature commissioned in 1807 to lay out the streets and roads in the City of New York were not city planners. Only one of the three, Simeon De Witt, had any relevant expertise: he had been trained as a surveyor and held the office of Surveyor General of the State of New York. John Rutherford came from a merchant family in the city and had been a U.S. senator. Presumably he was to represent the city’s merchant interests. Gouverneur Morris was the most prominent of the three: a justly celebrated and respected patriot, he had been a delegate to the Continental Congress, a signer of the Articles of Confederation, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, a member of the committee that drafted the constitution, and a U.S. senator. In 1810, while still serving on the streets and roads commission, he became chairman of the Erie Canal commission as well. What he brought to the commission was clout. The streets and roads commissioners were, in short, political appointees whose job was in the first place a political one: they were to ensure that the city’s merchant interests prevailed over the opposing interests of the big landowners as the city grew northwards up the island of Manhattan.

So much of the public face of Manhattan -— the walls of its streets —- is brick or stone that it is often an effort to remember that behind a great many of the older masonry exteriors is an interior built almost entirely of wood. Even the famous brownstones are for the most part brick and wood structures faced with stone. Some 80% of the nearly 150,000 buildings that were put up on the island in its “long” 19th century, 1790–1910, were of what came to be called “ordinary” construction: load-bearing exterior walls of brick supporting an interior structure of timber joists, wooden floors, wooden rafters supporting wood-sheathed roofs, wood-framed interior partitions, wooden furring and laths, wooden staircases, interior and exterior doors, doorway and window frames, and a whole miscellany of wooden moldings and other fittings.

By Richard Howe By the end of the 19th century most of the streets and avenues laid out on the island of Manhattan by the 1811 Commissioners Plan and its 1870 northern extension by the Central Park Commissioners had been opened to traffic and as much as two-thirds or more of them had been paved. The island’s rural estates had been broken up and sold after having been subdivided into building lots conforming to the blocks in the street plan. Most of the island up to about 168th Street had been densely built up, with nearly 100,000 buildings —- over 80,000 of them residential -— carpeting the built-up area. At least 90% of all the buildings on the island -— and 99% of the residential buildings -— were no more than six stories tall; the average height was about five stories: 60 feet at a nominal 12 feet per story. And at least 75% of the buildings were 20–25 feet wide and 60–80 feet deep. But why? Why so many buildings, and why so many in just this range of sizes?

By Benjamin Feldman Walk the moonscape of far East 38th Street today: the sidewalks are empty, devoid of life, though the streets hum and clog with traffic at rush hours as the entrances and exits to the Queens Midtown Tunnel spill forth. Those who emerge from the taxis and limos are well-scrubbed, their private baths drawn and terry robes donned. Toilettes in the neighborhood were not always this way. Where once, sidewalk games filled the air and factory whistles shrilled their shifts, not a trace remains of life as it was, circa 1900. Close your eyes and imagine the Gashouse District. It’s open to question if improvements have come.